In this week's rehearsal with myself I added onto what I'm calling "Conversations with Yourself."

“Conversations with Yourself” is currently a movement exploration working toward a solo. Finding a way to make my art connect with the audience and touch something inside of them is very important to me and the only way I know to begin to address the problems discussed by Bill T. Jones in the MR interview when he said, "how do you have an informed public even have a taste for the type of work that...I enjoy? It has to happen from us."

In exploring the physical reactions we have to emotional, personal and everyday encounters resulting in the small gestures and reflexes that are produced from these encounters such as a sneeze, shrug, rolling your eyes, scrunching your lips, biting your cheek, laughing or dizziness. I am deriving large physical movements from these reflexes/gestures as well as incorporating the original gestures to create a deep resonance or familiar connection with the audience. My plan is to use this method to devise the movements for a final solo. Although I already have ideas for projections, I want to perform the solo first with no projections and get feedback on it's resonance before adding additional stimuli.

In this week's rehearsal, I began again by remembering last week's rehearsal, layering in more concrete transitions and intentions. Then I came up with as many recognizable hand gestures as possible and videoed an improv, requiring myself to use the hand gestures in the improv as much as possible. When I watched the video, I thought it was interesting that my improv looked much like a phrase from Alexandra Beller's class and since she's already doing that, I decided to go further. So, I then gave myself new parameters, requiring the hand gestures to be done at the same time as the physical body movements such as a turn, jump, kick etc. This was a difficult task, and didn't always happen in the improv, but after I watched the video, I could then select specific sections I liked and then taught them to myself. I thought it was really interesting as well how detailed my improvisation was, making teaching it back to myself quite difficult.

So far the material I've created and kept has gestures consistently throughout. However, since I've now compiled contradicting gestures, emotions and postures from these everyday encounters, I wonder if a story or consistent emotion can be drawn from a solo that is comprised of such a schizophrenic score.